Online Backup Services Catch On Page 2

Red8 Studios, a media production company with offices in Los Angeles and Shanghai, is a smaller Arsenal customer that chose an on online backup service for another reason: location.

"We need to back up our media files from our Shanghai office because that's where most of our production is actually done," says Randy Shiozaki, an executive producer at the company. "What we were doing in the past was buying relatively inexpensive firewire drives ... but people weren't always following the protocol."

So Arsenal's ViaRemote product helped to automate the process, and, just as important to Red8 Studios' clients, it ensured that their data was backed up to secure locations in the U.S. "As I'm approaching new clients, I can explain to them that their data, while being produced 8,000 miles away, is actually residing within the United States," says Shiozaki. "That's a huge, huge, comfort to them."

For SMB customers of The Planet, which provides managed online backup along with server hosting and a variety of other services, ease-of-use is an important consideration. Says Sam Fleitman, vice president of managed services, the ability to "schedule backups through a GUI, do recoveries, schedule retention periods, encryption, all of that through an easy-to-use GUI, was huge for them."

Backing up data over the public network obviously puts the spotlight on data security. Services from EVault, Arsenal, and others, encrypt data in flight and offer a variety of methods for encrypting data at rest at the service provider's data center. When data is encrypted for storage, it is encrypted on the client and can only be decrypted using the client's keys, so backup data is never visible at the backup location.

Sodexho: Mobile Enterprise Backup

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Sodexho, a 110,000-employee food service and facilities management company headquartered in Gaithersburg, Md., is moving to EVault's online service as the backup mechanism of choice for its thousands of mobile laptops.

All new laptops use EVault for backup, and more than 200 existing laptops have been converted, but the process is just beginning. "Sodexho has adopted Evault's backup solution as a standard for our laptops," says Neil Block, senior business technology analyst in Sodexho's healthcare division, but he adds, "EVault is, in the scheme of things, fairly new to the Sodexho environment."

Block says the company has a goal of having a thousand laptops on EVault's service in the next year.

Before EVault, Sodexho supplied each user with a secondary drive for backup. "The end user would actually have to initiate the backup," says Block, and that meant that in many cases, backups were not completed. "Our end users just were not backing up." Moving to EVault's online service allowed Sodexho to schedule and automate backups for remote users.

Sodexho uses over-the-wire encryption for its laptop backups, but does not use EVault's at-rest AES encryption option. Thousands of individual laptop users would mean thousands of individual passwords, and key management is simply impractical. Says Block, "Having the end user [determine the password] is great, but if we don't have the ability to reset it, and they forget it, then it actually does no good for them."

In addition to its fleet of laptops, Sodexho backs up some of its remote office servers to EVault's storage vaults. Those servers that have been moved to EVault's service are those that were most in need of a backup upgrade. These were servers that were not backed up in accordance with "newly-defined security standards and Sarbanes-Oxley standards," says Block.

A Storage Service with Legs

Storage services, in general, have not met the heady expectations of a few years back.

But backup services, because they offload an otherwise unavoidable burden from smaller companies, because they can be effectively applied to remote offices of large companies, and because the data needs to go off-site anyway, offer a bright spot.

“Online backup is sort of the killer app that what's left of the storage service providers are using to offer a service to customers.”

 Tony Barbagallo, EVault

"Online backup is sort of the killer app that what's left of the storage service providers are using to offer a service to customers," says EVault's Barbagallo. Customers are less reluctant to outsource backup, he says, because it is a lot easier to swallow than having "all of your primary storage off-site."

Frank Brick of Arsenal sees a good year for the company's online backup service. "[ViaRemote] is probably going to represent 80% of our total aggregate growth in 2005," he says.

Chandler sees great potential in providing online backup services to SMBs, but notes that selling to a large number of customers in a variety of industries is a tough job. He says that telcos might have some success. "One idea that has floated around, and I think it's a valid one, is for the telcos, who sell a lot of services already to those companies, to add this to their menu."